Calling It (2 page)

Chapter Two

Dorie stepped into her bathroom and smiled. The lighting was low, the steam was rising as water filled the tub and the candles were lit. In her old life, meaning three weeks ago when she’d still been living in Boston with her brothers Christopher, Seamus, and Jack, those would not have been good things. If the lighting was low there, it was because Seamus had blown a fuse. Steam rising from the tub meant that Jack’s dog had gotten sprayed by a skunk again. And as for candles being lit? Necessity, not choice.

In her new apartment in Iowa, it was an entirely different story. Lights were low because she’d dimmed them, steam was rising because she was about to have an actual bath and the candles were purely for relaxation purposes. All she needed now was to choose from not one but three bottles of bubble bath. There she’d been, standing in the health and beauty aisle of the Hy-Vee, when the girlie subconscious she’d ignored for thirty years had risen up and seized control.

Having gone straight from her parents’ house to the apartment she’d shared with three of her six older brothers, she’d never had a bathroom to herself. Never had the luxury of bubble baths, never even had bath products to speak of.

Well, one time she’d been given bath beads, but Seamus had decided to use them for some kind of sex thing with one of his girlfriends. That in itself was enough to convince Dorie to stick to showers. Since Christopher and Jack had followed that up with a series of pranks on Seamus—which was, yes, hilarious, but that also required the rest of her supply—she never even had a choice.

With a sigh, Dorie picked up one of the bottles—strawberries and cream—and added a capful to the tub. Her brothers had driven her crazy—had driven her halfway across the country, in fact. But she missed them.
So
much. Forcing back the wave of homesickness, she closed her eyes and reminded herself she was following her new life plan.

Here in Inspiration they didn’t see her as the baby of the Donelli clan. She wasn’t the one cleaning up after her brothers—physically or metaphorically—or tagging along behind them, or standing by as they lived their lives and she only existed in hers. Here, she was just Dorie, the fully grown woman they took seriously enough to hire to run their library.

Damn straight. And she was going to be
awesome
.

So, yes, maybe it freaked her out a little that she was completely on her own. That wasn’t something anyone here needed to know.

At least, she hoped no one knew. She’d tried to be cool and professional at dinner tonight with her new boss—aka Mayor Gin—but she may have told a few too many stories about her family or talked about Boston too much. The mayor had laughed at all the appropriate times but, to be honest, Dorie wasn’t entirely confident she’d managed to pull off the I-am-confident-and-competent-woman-hear-me-roar thing. Or, considering she was the new town librarian, hear-me-assert-myself-quietly-but-with-total-authority.

Dorie laid her robe to the side of the ridiculously large Jacuzzi tub and took a deep breath as she got into the water.

Of course, she thought as she sank down into the water, she might also be a little bit unsettled due to the fact that Mayor Gin’s full name was Virginia Hawkins. As in, mom to
the
Nate Hawkins of Iowa-Dream-high-school-basketball-and-now-Major-League-Baseball fame. Nate Hawkins, incidentally, who filled out his pin-striped baseball pants so well that if she wasn’t soaking wet already, she would be now.

As the bubbles floated across Dorie’s skin, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine him letting his towel drop to the floor and sinking down into the bathtub with her. Okay, so it was no stretch at all. She’d been fantasizing about him since she was thirteen, when the sixteen-year-old version of Nate had been the cutest boy her middle-school self had ever laid eyes on.

She’d been a little too obvious about her crush, though, and her brothers had teased her about it to no end. They still did. At least now they were a thousand-plus miles away and therefore unlikely to show up on her doorstep, despite their ongoing threats. Her brothers were overprotective enough that even her fantasy men needed to be able to stand up to them. She smiled. Nate Hawkins was a catcher in the Major Leagues. Six large, angry men coming at him was just another day on the job.

Letting her thoughts run wild, Dorie stretched her arms out along the tub’s sides and turned up the jets until the water rippled and pulsed around her. Just as she was reaching down between her legs to help all that pulsing move along, she froze. Yes, she was in a Nate Hawkins haze at the moment, but she could have sworn she’d heard someone say, “Honey, I’m home.”

She sat up when that was followed by, “Chili cheese casserole? Hot
damn
.”

Blindly reaching for her robe—literally, since she’d taken her contacts out and couldn’t see a freakin’ thing—Dorie stood up. The water cascaded down her body, taking her happy thoughts with it.

Seriously?

Had her brothers really done it? Planned a surprise visit just to check in? They were so ridiculous she honestly wouldn’t put it past them.

“To-
mmyyyy
!” she roared. Because of all of them, he was the most blatantly obnoxious. With a huff, she knotted the belt around her waist, then yanked open the bathroom door and stormed down the hall. “
My
casserole, Tommy. I left enough meatballs for you to eat for a month. Get your hands out of my—”

She stopped suddenly when the man in her kitchen muttered, “Shit.”

That wasn’t Tommy’s voice, and it sure as hell wasn’t his stocky build. Tommy was only a few inches taller than her. The man standing in her kitchen was over six feet tall and all lean muscle. That much she could tell even without her glasses.

She squinted, trying to see which of her brothers’ friends this could be—there was something about him that seemed familiar even in all of his blurriness. Plus, all of her brothers’ friends always went straight to the fridge. There was Sean’s college roommate, who was from Des Moines, and she was pretty sure that one of Jack’s old bandmates lived in Omaha, two and a half hours away. It was highly possible one of them had been recruited. “Okay, give. Who are you, and which of my brothers sent you?”

An eternity of silence passed before the man answered. “You don’t know who I am?”

Um, hello? Who came into someone else’s house—Ate
.
Her.
Food.
—and then had the nerve to sound offended that she didn’t know who he was. She took another step forward, trying to get close enough to see him better. “All I know right now is that you’re the guy who’s eating my dinner. Except I didn’t get to have it for dinner because N—”

She cut herself off. No. She was not allowed to think that ever again. The mayor was her boss, not “Nate Hawkins’s mom.” “Because my
boss
asked me to have dinner, so I didn’t get to eat it, but I was planning on having it for lunch tomorrow and...” Trying to make out his face, she squinted again. “And I know all of three people in this town, so, no, I have no idea who you are other than the guy who’s eating
my dinner
!”

So maybe she was overreacting. But she’d been having a really good—and on its way to being even better—bath. “I swear. Whichever one of my brothers sent you to check up on me can just go fu—”

He coughed.

No, that hadn’t been a cough. It was much more like a...

“You’re
laughing
?” she asked. “You eat my—”

“Dinner?” he said. Definitely laughing.

Her eyes narrowed.

“Sorry,” he said, wisely getting himself under control. “Although I’m pretty sure I’d happily eat anything you offered.”

Dorie’s mouth dropped open. Was he...? Did he mean...?

For heaven’s sake. So what if his voice had dropped down nice and low? It was just her overly active imagination moving her Fantasy Train from Nate Hawkins Land straight to hot-guy-in-my-kitchen territory. Which wasn’t the worst thing. Although she tried to avoid hookups with her brothers’ friends, Jack’s bandmate wouldn’t be the worst way to spend an evening. A touch of home and all that.

He stood up straighter and she forced herself to refocus on what he was saying.

“Look, I have no idea who your brothers are, and I’m really sorry about your dinner...”

Um... “I’m sorry?” He had no idea who they were?

So if her brothers hadn’t sent him—if, in fact, he had no connection to her family—then she was standing dripping wet in her living room, naked except for her robe. With a total stranger, no less.

Thanks to a lifetime of defending herself in wrestling matches with brothers who couldn’t care less that she was a) a girl and b) smaller than them, she could take him down regardless of how big he was. Or how, um, solid. It would ruin her relaxing evening to the point of no recovery, however. She took a step back.

“Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t come any closer.”

She reached down behind her, groping for the phone but finding something else instead. A baseball bat, of all things. It belonged to her landlord, as did all the furniture and a surprising number of baseball-related knickknacks.

Could be worse. There was one of those big foam hands around somewhere.

Hauling the bat up into a swinging stance, she warned, “Come any closer and I swear to God I’ll take your head off faster than you can say
casserole.
”

His hands went up in the air and he took a step back. “Uh, okay. Looks like we’ve had a bit of a misunderstanding.” Then he sat on one of the stools. “Damn, woman. You sure have a thing about food.”

Hell, yes, she had a thing about food. She’d grown up with six brothers, every one of whom could eat an entire lasagna faster than she could wrap her hand around the serving spoon. “It’s an awesome casserole.”

“That it is,” he murmured appreciatively, sending a bolt of heat directly down to where she did
not
need it. Her nipples puckered, but she blamed it on the fact that she’d just been living in major imaginary sin. She took another step back. His eyesight was probably better than hers. But, oh boy, did the man smell good.

Then again, maybe it was just the casserole.

“You should go,” she said. It came out much more hoarsely than she’d intended.

“I, uh...” His voice had the same raspiness. “I could use a minute.”

There was no doubt in her mind why he needed a minute, especially when she realized her robe had slipped when she’d lifted the bat, and he had a grade-A view of, well, everything. She lowered the bat and snatched her robe closed. “Maybe you could use that minute to tell me who you are.”

“Right. Or maybe we could just cut to the chase,” he said, no longer giving off that somewhat amused vibe. It had pissed her off, but she preferred it to the turn things had just taken.

“You break into my place and you’re giving me attitude?” Asshole. No more nice librarian. Using the I-mean-business trick the nuns at St. Mary’s had used, she rapped the bat on the floor for emphasis. “So let’s go back to ‘who are you’ and then move on to how you got in.”

“You really don’t know.” This time, it was more a statement than a question.

“I really have no idea.” And her patience was wearing thin. “Should I?”

“Fitz didn’t tell you?”

“Fitz, as in my landlord?”

“Your landlord?” he snapped. “She moved out?”

He’d asked that in kind of the way a...

Oh, great—was she standing here half-naked with her landlord’s boyfriend? Or maybe ex-boyfriend, given that he seemed to have no clue Fitz had moved out a month ago.

Even though she hadn’t gotten any crazy or dangerous vibes—something she was pretty attuned to after all the years of dealing with her brothers’ exes—she clutched the handle of the bat and adjusted her stance a little. Just to be safe.

Reading her body language far too clearly, he dialed down the agitation. She actually felt it happen, like the air rushing out of the hole in a balloon.

“D.B.,” he said.

“Huh?”

“My name.” He gestured. “On the bat. D.B. My bat. My place.”

She looked down. Brought the bat up closer to her face. Yes, there were the initials
D.B.
carved right in. “Oh. But...” She raised her eyes to his—or, rather, in the general direction of his. “So then who is Fitz?”

“My sister,” he said, sounding kind of...sad? He recovered quickly, though. “I needed a place to crash tonight. Didn’t realize she’d moved.”

Oh, that wasn’t playing fair. Except if he didn’t know her brothers, much less that she had any, then he also probably had no clue that playing the sister card would get her every time.

“I just moved in a few weeks ago,” she explained, feeling the need to reassure him.

The air changed again. Although she still couldn’t make out his features, she had absolutely zero doubt that he was staring at her.

And suddenly all the tension was back, albeit in an entirely different way. It crackled in the air around her.

She nearly jumped when he cleared his throat and stood up, saying, “Look. This has been—” his laugh sounded as resigned as it did bitter “—fun. But I’ll go. Like you said. I’ll—”

“
Wait.
”

The word was said so adamantly Dorie almost didn’t realize it had come from her own mouth.

Because it was asinine. Foolish. A mistake in a whole host of ways.

He was her landlord’s brother, but that didn’t mean he was harmless. Yet she heard herself saying, “It’s late. It’s, uh, your apartment. And probably your bed
.
You should sleep in it.”

When he started to protest, she said, “Really. Stay. Just let me grab some clothes and then the bedroom’s all yours.” She turned and walked down the hallway before she offered up anything else.

Like dessert, for example. After she dropped her robe.

For heaven’s sake. Maybe her brothers were right to worry and she truly shouldn’t be trusted to be on her own.

The first thing she did was detour into the bedroom and grab her glasses—if the man was going to spend the night with her, she was damn well going to see what he looked like. And she’d call her landlord. Confirmation that the man was actually Fitz’s brother was still required.